


Five Times Diana Fowley Spoke To Teena Mulder

by memories_child



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alternate Canon, Community: xf_santa, F/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-23
Updated: 2012-01-23
Packaged: 2017-10-30 00:57:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/325999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/memories_child/pseuds/memories_child
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five Times Diana Fowley Spoke To Teena Mulder</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Times Diana Fowley Spoke To Teena Mulder

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wendelah1](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wendelah1/gifts).



> **Spoilers:** Pre-series to season 7  
>  **Disclaimer:** The X Files, unfortunately, does not belong to me. Much as I’d love to say I came up with it.  
>  **Author's Notes:** This was written for LJ's 2010 xf_santa gift exchange. It does include my own take on canon, where YMMV. Thanks to hankmoodyblues for the beta.

i. Diana watches Fox walk across the podium. His heels tap-tap on the polished wooden floorboard and he lifts his hand to his neck to adjust his tie. She keeps her eyes trained on him as he shakes the Director's hand, receives his badge and credentials. After weeks of training (firearms, ethics, interviewing, case exercises), weeks of early mornings and late nights, and arguments over the smallest of things, Fox is finally graduating. She allows herself a smile. She had every faith that he would pass, of course. And pass top of his class.

Fox's eyes search for hers in the crowd of family and friends and she smiles at him. He nods, imperceptibly, back at her and takes his seat at the left of the platform. The class spokesman, selected by the budding agents (mainly, Fox had told her, to make himself feel important and stop pestering the rest of them with questions), addresses the room and she allows herself to fade out from his speech on the challenges faced and obstacles overcome during the training. She'd heard them all from Fox, numerous times. After the class spokesman come the awards. Top achievers in academics, firearms and physical fitness mount the platform one more time to accept their accolades. Fox, with his Oxford degree, takes the prize for academics. No surprise there, she thinks, and is surprised to find a twinge of jealousy spark through her. She claps even harder to make up for it.

Once the ceremony is over she pushes her way past small groups of recruits, proud parents clapping sons on their backs and embracing daughters, to where Fox stands. He is on the fringes of the crowd, as always, scanning left and right until he spots her and grins.

"Top of the class again," she teases.

"No thanks to you."

He pulls her into an embrace and kisses her. She flicks his lips with her tongue, tasting sweat and peppermint (do these rooms always have to be so hot?) and presses herself against him.

"I'm pretty sure you're not meant to seduce a newly recruited FBI agent," he murmurs, pulling away.

"Is that all it takes? God help you if you're ever undercover. The Russians would have our secrets in no time."

He laughs and pulls her to his side.

"Takeout on the way home?" he asks, slipping his fingers between hers. "My treat."

"Your paycheck hasn't come in yet," she replies, but pulls him to the door anyway.

They're nearly at the entrance when Fox stops dead.

"Fox -" she begins, just as she hears another voice call the same name.

"Mom. What are you doing here?"

"I couldn't miss your graduation."

Teena Mulder is smartly dressed and carries herself the same way that all women – at least all the women Diana has known – of a certain class and breeding carry themselves. She’s wrapped a cashmere shawl (Diana can’t help noting the quality of the material) around her shoulders and carries a patent black leather purse loosely in one hand. Diana can tell from the lack of a brand name that it’s expensive.

“You saw it?”

“All of it. You should have told me you were top of the class in behavioural science.”

Fox looks down. For a moment Diana wonders if he’ll shuffle his feet, a naughty schoolboy. But he looks up instead and grins.

“I wanted to surprise you.”

“I’m very proud of you, Fox. You’ve always been such a bright boy and to think that you’re using your talents to help your country… They’re not going to waste.”

Fox hasn’t let go of her hand, she realises. Not for the whole time he’s been talking to his mother. She squeezes gently.

“Oh. Mom, I want you to meet Diana. Diana, this is Teena Mulder.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she says. Teena takes her proffered hand and squeezes.

“And a pleasure to meet you. Fox has told me so much about you.”

Diana sees through the lie immediately, but appreciates the thought behind it. Fox hasn’t told anyone about her. But then she hasn’t told anyone about him. Anyone important, at least.

“We were just going to get a takeout,” she says. “Would you like to join us? It’ll probably be on paper plates in front of the TV but you’d be more than welcome.”

Teena smiles but shakes her head.

“I have to get back. Your father… Your father says he’s sorry he couldn’t make it. He’s proud of you too, you know.”

Fox nods and looks away. Teena stands awkwardly, fumbling with her bag.

“I’ll see you soon, Fox. Come up to visit. Diana, it was good to meet you.”

She turns and walks away. Diana squeezes Fox’s hand again, but he doesn’t respond.

 

ii. Diana had always thought she’d be nervous before her wedding day, but she isn’t. She’s surprisingly calm, and if she thinks that should worry her she doesn’t show it. The dress, hanging on the back of the bedroom door, is simple; white with a lace trim, and her bouquet of spring flowers matches the weather. She hasn’t seen Fox this morning (“It’s bad luck,” he whispered to her last night before slipping out of the house) but Teena has been flitting around the apartment since six.

She has tried, unsuccessfully, not to put herself in Teena’s place this morning. How would she feel if it was her daughter who’d been taken; if the closest she could come to being the mother of the bride was to fuss over her son’s fiancé. She can’t imagine it. She’s sure, though, that she’d be more bitter than Teena.

“Diana, there are pancakes for you in the kitchen.” As if she’d conjured it just by thinking of her, Teena’s voice floats through the hall. Diana smiles. She’d told Teena she didn’t want a fuss, that she wouldn’t be able to eat anything because of nerves, but her stomach growls hungrily at her and she leaves the room.

The kitchen table is set for two. Pancakes are piled in a steaming, golden heap in the centre of the table. Butter, maple syrup and honey are dotted around them and a pitcher of orange juice vies for space with two mugs of hot coffee.

“I hope you don’t mind, but I thought I might join you.”

Diana can hear the tentative question at the end of the sentence and smiles wildly.

“Teena, I’d love it.”

They sit in companionable silence, broken only by the ting of spoons against the ceramic mugs and the hum of traffic outside. The pancakes are good, the coffee sweet. Diana could almost forget that in less than two hours’ time she’ll be getting married.

“Were you nervous?” She asks once she’s eaten her fill.

“On my wedding day? Terrified.” Teena lowers her mug and stares out of the window. “All I wanted was to be alone for a few hours. My last hours of space – for me to be me. But my maid of honour was there, and my bridesmaids – running around. My mother kept flitting around the house, moving everything I put down so I couldn’t find it again. The hairdresser she’d booked months before – because her friend’s daughter had booked her, and my mother just had to keep up with the Joneses – was digging grips into my scalp and my make up was scattered all over the dresser. I could have screamed. I could barely get my dress on, my hands were shaking so much. And I thought I was going to be sick on the drive to the Church.

“But when I got there and saw Bill waiting for me. Well, my nerves just disappeared. I walked down that aisle more sure than anything I had been in my life. My voice didn’t even shake when I said ‘I do’.”

She smiles at Diana. “You’ll be fine. Fox adores you, you know. And it – it will be nice to have another girl around.”

Diana can feel the tears pricking at the backs of her eyes. She wants to say something to Teena, anything. To let her know that those words mean more to her than Teena could possibly know. To make her realise how sorry she is that things will turn out the way they will. Instead, she watches as Teena clears the dishes away and the water pours into the sink.

 

iii. Nothing Teena could do could surprise her, Diana thinks. Not anymore, at least. She watches the older woman standing at the graveside as the Priest makes his way through the service.

“All that the Father giveth me shall come to me: and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.”

She stands, impassive. Diana watches her for any sign of emotion – grief, anger, pain. She knows what Bill did. Knows it more than Fox, perhaps, and it faintly amazes her that Teena would still show up at the funeral, stand next to the Priest, mourn the body that’s being lowered into the ground. It’s not something she thinks she could ever do.

She thinks about Fox as the Priest continues reading from his small, black Bible: “He that raised up Jesus from the dead: will also quicken your mortal bodies by the spirit which dwelleth in you. Wherefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoiceth: my flesh also shall rest in hope.” She has heard that Fox has disappeared. She has various channels open to her, even though Fox believes that she’s in Europe, and better off without him, and knows he’s been missing in the New Mexico desert for days now. Her thoughts flit to the Priest’s words. Will Fox rise from the dead this time? Will he come back even more full of his quest, or will she have to attend another Mulder funeral in the not too distant future?

As if she’s wondering the same thing, Teena scans the crowd. Diana turns away; she’d rather not have Teena see her here. Especially not with Scully, Fox’s new shadow, apparently, shifting uncomfortably at the graveside. Some things were easier to let lie, and she doesn’t want to cause Teena any more discomfort than she is already going through.

The Priest moves onto the final prayer and as Teena places a flower on the coffin, Diana turns away.

“Unto Almighty God we commend the soul of our brother departed, and we commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” The words float over the cemetery as Diana makes her way to the car that’s waiting for her at the gates. She thinks she hears, on the very edge of hearing, Scully telling Teena that she’s sure Fox will be found. She hopes, for all their sakes, that she’s right.

 

iv. Diana stopped pacing the hallway five hours ago. It wasn’t helping Fox, and the only thing it was doing for her was give her a migraine. She sits in a hardbacked, plastic chair, watching the monitor. There is a camera trained on Fox, watching his every move. He’s been, not quiet, but less agitated for three hours now. He hasn’t screamed and she thanks whatever gods might be out there for that. That was one of the worst things – the way his mouth gaped, the hoarse scream that she could hear even through six inches of steel. It cut right through her.

Scully’s been following up a lead – in Africa, if her sources are to be believed – for two days. Diana doubts that she’ll get very far, but at least it’s given her some time with Fox. She knows he can read her thoughts, though isn’t sure whether he can reach her through solid concrete and 10 millilitres of Propofol. To be on the safe side, though, she thinks of the safer things: what she saw on TV last night; where she’d take a vacation if time and money were no object. Occasionally she thinks of the times she and Fox shared together. Her favourite memories – and the ones she’d most like to see Fox’s reaction to – are those of lazy Sunday mornings spent making love. They’d worked their way through each room in their small apartment the first month they were there. The kitchen, twice; the bathroom, three times. Five, if you counted the tiny shower room tacked onto the room. The bedroom they’d made love in too many times to count, and she often thought of that room. The way the sun played through the half-shut blinds; the vase of lilies resting on the worn, white dresser; the warm weight of the eiderdown quilt and Fox’s legs tangling with hers. She smiles and hopes that Fox can read those thoughts. Maybe they’ll prove to him that she did love him, after all.

Her reverie is broken by the clop of heels on the white linoleum. She sighs and straightens her shoulders – another nurse, probably, come to check on the patient. She makes a mental note to speak to Fox’s doctor about him being disturbed. Standing, she turns to face the double doors breaking the hallway in two, and is surprised to see Teena Mulder striding through them. Teena seems just as surprised to see her.

“Diana.”

“Teena. I – I wasn’t expecting you.”

“Apparently not.” Teena looks her up and down. “It seems that no one thought to call me and tell me that Fox was here. It was a friend of Bill’s who told me, eventually.”

Diana has a pretty good idea which friend of Bill’s passed the message on, but says nothing.

“I’m sorry. I should have called – I wasn’t thinking straight.”

She follows Teena’s gaze to the monitor, where she can Fox lying, face down, on the small cot. All the fight seems to go out of her as she watches her son.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“The doctors don’t know. They said there’s activity in the temporal lobe that won't allow his brain to rest. They’ve tried to sedate him but it doesn’t work.”

“He hated the hospital when he was young. We had to rush him in one night. Appendicitis. It was before Samantha was… Before Samantha was taken. He’d been playing in the yard with her all day. Collecting crab apples from the trees at the bottom of the garden. The pitched a tent with my old sheets and piled the apples inside it. The pile was nearly as big as Samantha was.”

Teena pauses, her eyes trained on her son. Diana wants to push her away, to tell her to stop. She can’t listen to stories of Fox when he was younger, when he still had a sister. If she does, she knows, she’ll fall apart. You don’t stop loving someone when you’ve shared what she and Fox have. But she looks at Teena and forces herself to listen. Teena, after all, has lost more than she has.

“He started complaining that his stomach hurt after dinner. I thought it was the apples. We told him and Samantha year after year that they weren’t to eat them. They were too sour. Of course, year after year they didn’t listen.” She smiles. “I told him to drink plenty of water and the pain would go away. But it didn’t. At midnight I couldn’t take it any more and told Bill to get the car. We wrapped Samantha up in her blanket and Bill carried Fox. He moaned all the way to the hospital. I was so scared. They rushed him into surgery, which seemed to last all night. It was touch and go, they told us later, but he made it. He hated hospitals after that though. Didn’t want to go anywhere near them.”

She turns to her son again. The monitor is grainy, black and white, but he stares directly at them.

“Does he know I’m here?”

 _I don’t know,_ Diana wants to say. _I don’t know any more than you do._ But instead she takes Teena’s hands. “He knows.”

They stand, hands clasped, watching the images on the monitor. Fox is quiet now, staring blankly at the camera they have trained on him twenty four hours a day. Only his mouth is moving, repeating one word over and over again.

 

v. It is an open casket. Diana is surprised; she’d heard through the grapevine that it was suicide and expected… Well, she isn’t sure what she expected. Pills were the most common cause of suicide for women but she’d never expected Teena to be common.

A terminal illness. Too many secrets. She knows too well what those burdens are like. Maybe that’s why she’s here. She certainly hadn’t intended to make the trip to Raleigh, North Carolina, when she heard of Teena’s death. The grapevine being what it was, it could still reach former FBI agents in hiding. Plastic surgery and name changes didn’t mean much where gossip was concerned, but she’d thought little of it. Another name to add to the list of people she knew who were no longer here. She thought of Fox, of course, but wondered whether, really, it was all for the best. So it had been something of a surprise to find her hands and feet moving independently of her brain; packing a suitcase of suitable mourning clothes and making their way to her silver Sedan.

‘I’ll just pay my respects. I’ll just make sure Fox is okay,’ she repeated to herself on the long drive across country. But when she pulled up outside the funeral home she admitted that the only reason she came was to make sure Teena was dead.

She makes her way to the front of the funeral home, passing family and friends dressed in black on the way. She keeps her head down, eyes trained on the mahogany coffin, inlaid with gold in front of her. She clocked Fox when she first entered the room and has told herself that under no circumstances will she approach him. Particularly as Scully is close by him at all times. So she skirts the room, keeps her head down, makes herself as inconspicuous as possible.

Teena is lying in the satin-lined box. Her eyes are closed, her hands resting on her chest. She looks…the same. Diana isn’t sure whether there would be anything different about her – whether, the spirit having left the body under such circumstances, sorrow would be lined on her face. But Teena looks like she did in life: proud; stoic; unbending.

“Let him rest in peace,” Diana whispers, before she turns and walks away.  
 _More author’s notes:_ I mentioned above that this fits with my version of canon so I thought I’d explain that a bit more. We all know what 1013 were like when it comes to continuity, and Diana’s storyline is one of the least developed of them all. I figured I could use this fic to flesh her out a bit more and explore what I think happened. You can see that I think Mulder and Diana were married (I can’t yet work out why they divorced). I also think they met before the X Files were discovered. I have more ideas about that, but I think I’ll leave those for another fic (and I’ve had one in the planning stages for well over a year now). I also don’t think that Diana died in The Sixth Extinction II. I don’t know yet whether I think she faked her own death or if CSM somehow helped her – I think he cared about her too much to let her die. But again, those are ideas for another fic.

**Author's Note:**

>  _More author’s notes:_ I mentioned above that this fits with my version of canon so I thought I’d explain that a bit more. We all know what 1013 were like when it comes to continuity, and Diana’s storyline is one of the least developed of them all. I figured I could use this fic to flesh her out a bit more and explore what I think happened. You can see that I think Mulder and Diana were married (I can’t yet work out why they divorced). I also think they met before the X Files were discovered. I have more ideas about that, but I think I’ll leave those for another fic (and I’ve had one in the planning stages for well over a year now). I also don’t think that Diana died in The Sixth Extinction II. I don’t know yet whether I think she faked her own death or if CSM somehow helped her – I think he cared about her too much to let her die. But again, those are ideas for another fic.


End file.
